Dear Editor:
We would like to respond to the letter by Dr. Viroj Wiwanitkit (page 613). First, the results obtained from this work are definitely not by chance because this was a single-blind (single-masked), randomized clinical trial. Only the teacher of the patients was blind to the study and hence the behavior assessments of the patients were not biased. Aside from that, we have already acknowledged that there were some limitations of the study in the Discussion section. Furthermore, as Dr. Wiwanitkit has pointed out, there were no data on Thai traditional massage (TTM) and its effect in neuropsychiatry; therefore, we decided to investigate its uses in children with autism. This decision was based on the results from several studies utilizing similar strategies such as massages and touch therapies. Our study is the first of its kind to directly show the effects of TTM in Thai children with autism. Second, we would like to point out that the control group has been matched for age, sex, and duration of autism (Table 1
1
). These differences were not significantly different between both groups at baseline. As for the sample size, we have already acknowledged that it is one of our limitations and may not have been able to show any significant improvement in other variables studied. Third, we have provided details on TTM on page 1357. We agree that there are some varieties on TTM procedures and therefore we chose the TTM from WATPO where it is the original and well-known Thai Traditional Medicine and Massage School in Bangkok, and we employed only one masseur in our study. However, we suggest additional studies.
